Today, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) are protocols of the web. TCP is a generic, reliable transport protocol, providing guaranteed delivery, duplicate suppression, in-order delivery, flow control, congestion avoidance and other transport features. HTTP is an application level protocol providing basic request/response semantics. For example, as shown in FIG. 1, HTTP Requester 110 may send a request, such as for a web page, over network 120. HTTP Responder 130 may receive the HTTP request and return an HTTP response, such as content for the requested web page.
Unfortunately, HTTP over TCP was not particularly designed with consideration of latency effects. Request and response headers vary in size and can include some redundancy. Furthermore, web pages transmitted today are significantly different in size and function from web pages 10 years ago.
Previous solutions to address web latency have included changes at the transport layer. Proposals have included, for example, replacing TCP with another transport-layer protocol such as Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) or Structured Stream Transport (SST). Other proposals include intermediate-layer protocols in between the transport and application layers. However, changes to the existing transport protocol would be very difficult to employ and problems inherent in HTTP would still need to be addressed.